A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to … [Read more...]

Most rewrite and redirect attacks are directed against the HOSTS file(s) on infected machines. The HOSTS file is used by an operating system (not just … [Read more...]

A buffer is an area of computer memory set aside for data. Many buffers are fixed length. The proper procedure for inserting data into a buffer is to … [Read more...]

Using Trojan Horse programs or worms/viruses, a person (often called a "botmaster" or "herder") can inject malware into a user's computer which opens … [Read more...]

Narrative histories are available from several sources. The information in this section was provided by and used with permission of Dr. Solomon … [Read more...]

It all started in 1986. Basit and Amjad realised that the boot sector of a floppy diskette contained executable code, and this code is run whenever … [Read more...]

The year 1988 was fairly quiet, as far as virus writing went. Mostly, it was the year that anti-virus vendors started appearing, making a fuss about … [Read more...]

During 1989 things really started to move. The Fu Manchu virus (a modification of Jerusalem) was sent anonymously to a virus researcher in the UK, and … [Read more...]

By 1990, it was no longer a matter of running a couple of dozen search strings down each file. Mark Washburn had taken the Vienna virus, and created … [Read more...]

In 1991, the virus problem was sufficiently interesting to attract the large marketing companies. Symantec launched Norton Anti-Virus in December … [Read more...]